Article excerpt

One victim was killed in her yard; the other execution was
captured on a video.

Taliban insurgents publicly executed two women, one of them in an
apparent so-called honor killing, in northern Afghanistan recently,
according to Afghan officials, members of the victims' families and
a video posted online.

The killings, which were thought to be unrelated, took place in
recent months in northern Jowzjan Province, in predominantly Uzbek
areas where Taliban presence has traditionally been weak except
among ethnic Pashtuns.

The killings came to light after a video was circulated of one of
them and officials discovered evidence of the other.

In one of the cases, a pregnant 22-year-old woman named Rabia, a
mother of two young children, was accused by her husband of
adultery, tried and convicted by the Taliban on the spot, and then
publicly shot three times. Members of her family said that her
husband had concocted the adultery charge because of a land dispute
between their families, and that he had wanted to inherit his wife's
interests in the land.

"They buried her without even allowing her family to participate
in her funeral," said Shakera, her aunt, who like many Afghans has
only one name.

"I know she was a very innocent woman," Shakera said, speaking by
telephone from her home in the provincial capital, Shibarghan. "She
did not have the heart to be unfaithful."

Another motive for the Taliban to kill her, Shakera said, was
that two of Rabia's uncles were militia commanders loyal to the
Uzbek leader, Abdul Rashid Dostum, who is also first vice president
of Afghanistan.

According to the deputy police chief of Jowzjan Province, Col.
Abdul Hafeez, the apparent killing took place in Memlek village in
the district of Faizabad. The district governor of Faizabad, Saira
Shekib, who is one of Afghanistan's few female governors, said it
had been personally carried out by the Taliban's shadow governor in
the district, whom she identified as Qari Rasool.

The killings were reminiscent of similar executions carried out
frequently from 1996 to 2001, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and
killed many women convicted of so-called moral crimes by shooting
them in the head at the National Stadium before large crowds. …